Insights on the Next Generation WLAN: High Experiences (HEX)

Wireless local area network (WLAN) witnesses a very fast growth in the past 20 years by taking the maximum throughput as the key technical objective. However, the quality of experience (QoE) is the most important concern of wireless network users. In this article, we point out that poor QoE is the most challenging problem of the current WLAN, and further analyze the key technical problems that cause the poor QoE of WLAN, including fully distributed networking architecture, chaotic random access, awkward ``high capability'', coarse-grained QoS architecture, ubiquitous and complicated interference, ``no place'' for artificial intelligence (AI), and heavy burden of standard evolving. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to point out that poor QoE is the most challenging problem of the current WLAN, and the first work to systematically analyze the technical problems that cause the poor QoE of WLAN. We highly suggest that achieving high experiences (HEX) be the key objective of the next generation WLAN.